Member Spotlight: Rana Hamdy

Rana Hamdy, MD, MPH, MSCE, FPIDS, is an Infectious Disease Specialist, Medical Director, Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, and Associate Director, Fellowship Training Program at Children’s National Hospital. She earned her medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she also completed her residency, and her pediatric infectious diseases fellowship was done at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Hamdy completed a master’s in public health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a master’s in clinical epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Dr. Hamdy currently serves as the ID Consultant Section Co-Editor of Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and as one of the Associate Editors. She has previously served on the Pediatric Committee on Antimicrobial Stewardship (PCAS) including as the committee chair from 2020-2023. She also serves as the PIDS Liaison to the AAP Section on Infectious Diseases, and previously served on the Publication Committee.  

Why pediatric ID? I found the infectious disease cases during medical school rotations to be the most interesting. Those were the ones I wanted to read more about, and when I went into pediatrics, they were the most interesting cases in the hospital. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to do anything else.

I was also very fortunate to have incredible role models to learn from. Dr. Julia McMillan, a legendary pediatric ID physician, was my pediatrics residency program director and my mentor. When I did my pediatric ID rotation in med school, Dr. Debbie Persaud at Johns Hopkins was the attending I was fortunate to work with, and I was really struck by her overall approach to her patients. We visited the micro lab together to discuss findings of our patients. We would go to radiology and have discussions with the radiologists, do primary literature reviews to help answer challenging questions that arose from the cases, and the whole process that went into management decisions really appealed to me. I fell in love with it.

Where have you taken your ID focus? I get to work across a lot of areas within pediatric infectious disease, particularly, antimicrobial stewardship and systems-based quality improvement related to that, clinical epidemiologic research, and fellow education. That structure is something I truly value in my work. It enables me to thrive by moving between different areas that also build off and complement each other. The variety of going between antimicrobial stewardship, strategic thinking and partnerships building that goes hand-in-hand with systems-based QI, clinical care, and trainee education and development helps keep me engaged, energized and productive. I found that insights from one area often strengthen and shape another.

What is a recent development in pediatric ID that you are working on? A current project I’m especially excited to share is work on “StrepApp”, which is very different from my prior work and new for me. In collaboration with machine learning engineering colleagues at my institution, we are developing an AI-informed algorithm that uses an image of the posterior pharynx along with clinical data with the aim of distinguishing group A strep from non-group A strep pharyngitis. We were fortunate to receive funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-H) to support a multi-institutional study. We are building a large dataset of clinical data paired with throat images of children who are being evaluated for strep throat at 10 different pediatric ERs or urgent cares across the country. Those data are used to train and refine the algorithm.

To be honest I was the skeptic on the team initially. I was excited about this project, but I really didn’t think it would be feasible. Our preliminary findings, however, are very encouraging. It looks like incorporating the image data of the throat along with the clinical variables does improve the predictive performance of differentiating group A strep from non-group A strep compared to the existing clinical prediction tools we have. We’re hopeful this app’s best use will be in the telemedicine setting as a screening tool to identify the children who may not need to go in for throat swab testing.What do you enjoy most about being a PIDS member? What keeps you renewing your membership? I love the sense of community and camaraderie. We’re all doing similar work at our own respective institutions and PIDS creates a space where we can learn from one another through webinars, meeting at conferences, asking questions on the forum. Having that community to reach out to for advice and suggestions is really valuable. Many of the multi-institutional collaborations that have generated so much meaningful new knowledge grew out of relationships formed through PIDS, or PIDS itself. Additionally, I love our Committee on Opportunity, Representation and Excellence (CORE; formerly IDA&E). It’s an example of the Society listening to the community and offering something we all need and learn from together. I’ve benefitted a lot from that work, as have my trainees.